On 07/04/2013 08:39 PM, Vidar Wahlberg wrote:
On Thu, Jul 04, 2013 at 07:18:18PM +0300, Juho Laatu wrote:
That doesn't sound so different from leveling seats. In the
Norwegian system, you give each county an extra seat, but this
seat is assigned based on the difference betweeen the seats so
far allocated (on county by county basis) and the national
apportionment. I'm not sure how the algorithm decides which
county gets which party's seats, but it's not a simple
biproportional thing.
Yes, the end result is probably very similar. The fact that each
leveling seat is tied to one county further reduces the difference
(since there are no "countyless" seats).
About the Norwegian leveling seat algorithm: The leveling seats goes
to the party (with at least 4% of the national votes) with the
highest quotient. Once a party in a county has received a leveling
seat, that county may not receive any more leveling seats. The
quotient is calculated as following: (party_county_votes /
(party_county_seats * 2 + 1) / (county_votes / county_seats)
"county_seats" does not include the leveling seat. Since each county
receives 1 leveling seat the result would be fairly close to just
increasing the amount of seats in the county by one, but smaller
parties who haven't received any seats at all in the county (but got
at least 4% of the national votes) have a slight advantage with the
leveling seat algorithm as the algorithm use 1 instead of 1.4 as the
first divisor.
I still am not quite sure how it works, because your quotient
description only refers to the county count, not the national count, and
I would expect the leveling seats to make use of both.
But I think I see the general outline: the discrepancy is calculated in
terms of national seats that "ought" to have been achieved, per party,
minus the number of seats actually achieved, and then the spare seats
are given to parties to bring the two counts more in line with each
other, in such a way that the parties that were closest to getting an
extra seat anyway (if that's what the quotient does) will get them.
If so, it's not that different from the biproportional representation
algorithm, but it still feels less intuitive than it. Hm, again I would
have to think about it further...
As for the election threshold, I completely agree with Juho, also
minorities should be represented in the parliament. I've never
really understood the argument that an increase in parties
represented in the parliament will lead to chaos. How the election
threshold work in Norway, that's not really what's preventing other
parties to be represented (that we're using 1.4 as the first divisor
in Sainte-Laguë is what's making it difficult for smaller parties to
get a foothold).
I think the argument goes that because the system is based on parties,
the various parties will act like unified blocs. Therefore, the actual
power in parliament will be closer to Banzhaf's power indices than the
fraction of the seats held by any given party.
As an extreme, say you have two coalitions: a left-wing and a right-wing
coalition. They're evenly matched (say 84 seats each). Then the last
seat is held by a party with low support (party X).
To attain majority, these combinations are theoretically possible:
Left-wing bloc + party X
Left-wing bloc + right-wing bloc
Right-wing bloc + party X
Each of the three groups can in theory ally with either of the other
two. This means that, as far as attaining a majority goes, the single
party-X seat has the same power as either of the two coalitions. And
that is obviously not desirable. The argument then is that if you add in
lots of very small parties, any of them might become a kingmaker and so
get extremely disproportional amounts of power.
I'm not sure I agree with it, but I can *understand* the argument. The
worries could be alleviated by somehow making party discipline less
strict so that it's harder for the parties to rule over their MPs, but I
don't know how to do that. Another option is to make minority rule the
default so that the "coalitions" shift according to the law or policy
being considered. But some would consider that more chaotic in another
manner.
I favour systems that are so simple that regular voters can easily
understand how they work.
Even though I'm a fan of Ranked Pairs & Condorcet methods, I too
share this sentiment. Another argument could be that voters probably
would be wary of drastically changing the existing voting system. In
the Norwegian voting system, changing it by removing election
threshold, increase seats in each county by 1 and remove leveling
seats, and possibly reduce the first Sainte-Laguë divisor slightly,
say 1.3, while making it possible for voters to rank parties, could
greatly help prevent the fear of "wasting" ones vote. Using the
counting method mentioned earlier (exclude party with fewest votes,
rerun Sainte-Laguë until all remaining parties got at least 1 seat),
it's arguably easier to explain than the current one with the
leveling seat algorithm.
It wouldn't help on the "I can't vote on my favourite party because
they [may] cooperate with a party which I don't like", but that's
arguably more of an issue with the parliament (or the people) than
the voting system, so that's a bit out of scope here.
If you're going to remove leveling seats, I would suggest adding some
other mechanism to make the national count more accurate. I've given two
ideas of what you might put in its stead: biproportional representation
(reweighting) or regional-level seats.
To show how national representation might be inaccurate otherwise, I'm
going to take an extreme. Consider what would happen if every
constituency had a single seat. Only the large parties would have any
chance of winning - and that is what you see in countries like the UK.
Yet that is the method that focuses most on local candidates: the
candidate that won got represents that particular constituency.
With multimember districts like Norway, the disproportionality wouldn't
be quite as bad, but you can still see it taking effect when you look at
parties that failed to pass the threshold. In going from 5.9% support in
2005 to 3.9% support in 2009, the Liberal Party, no longer permitted
leveling seats, had eight of its ten MPs taken away. That is not
proportional, and removing leveling seats altogether without some other
compensation mechanism would only make it worse.
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